A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade Read online

  They pass a slender tree lashed to a triangle of stakes. A nest the size of a tea saucer has toppled out of its branches. Bateman tips it over with his shoe so they can look underneath. There on the grass, spilling out of a speckled blue egg, is the goo of a half-formed bird, a strange lump of Vaseline with a dark net of veins inside it, connecting a pair of eyes and a tweezerlike beak and the popped red balloons of several tiny organs, one of which must be its heart. Kevin can hardly stand to look at it. That this transparent stew of parts, slopping around in the darkness of its shell, is all the bird will ever be gives him an awful gutshot feeling he cannot name, and he knows that if he thinks about it for too long tears will rise to his eyes. He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.

  Out of the blue Kenneth says to him, “Hey, Kevin, I’m not making fun of you, I’m just curious: Could you fit your dick in that egg?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Hey, Kevin, I’m not making fun of you, I’m just curious,” Thad says. “Do you have any hair on your dick yet?”

  “What’s you all’s obsession with my dick, anyway?”

  And then it is Bateman’s turn: “Hey, Kevin, what about your balls? Your Tes-ti-clees? Any hair down there?”

  “All right. Cut it out, guys.”

  “We’re not making fun of you, we’re just curious.”

  Kevin’s house is one snaking downhill street and half an uphill street away. The wind has fallen still, so calm that the clouds appear to be painted onto the sky. The insects have stopped creaking, the trees stopped whisking the air with their fingertips. By the time they reach his carport, all four of them look like Bateman, their shirts glued to their shoulders with sweat. Kevin goes to the refrigerator for a Little Hug, an orange one. He peels the foil cap off the plastic barrel and stands there chugging the drink, his hand on the open door. This time it is December in front of him and August behind. The refrigerator wicks the moisture from his chest and stomach. “Ah, mans, this feels good,” he says, and before long Thad, Bateman, and Kenneth are clustered with him in the light of the refrigerator, like campers bunched around a fire, washing down Little Hugs. It is almost 3:30—snack time. But when Kevin makes the announcement, the others laugh and say, “Snack time?” and “Hey, it’s time for snacks, everyone,” and “Holmes, I don’t know a single other house that does that. Only yours,” until the drums in his head go click-click-click and snack time is safely stored away, added to the list of things it is impermissible to acknowledge or say.

  His brother, Jeff, is spending the night somewhere else, with Jack Barnard or Jason Burton probably, his unknowable separate friends from his unknowable separate life, which means that until Kevin’s mom gets home from work, the house is entirely theirs. They are the grown-ups and can eat whatever they want, in whichever room they choose. They sling their bodies across the couch and the loveseat, trading a box of Cheez-Its back and forth. Shortly before dinner, Kenneth climbs onto the bumper seat of Bateman’s moped, and the two of them go putting out of the driveway, and have you ever noticed how, from a distance, a moped can sound like a bird rattling out a message in the trees? Soon Kevin’s mom arrives home with Happy Meals from McDonald’s. Thad and Kevin eat their cheeseburgers and fries at the kitchen counter, sitting on the tall wooden stools with the vinyl cushions, leaning slowly over until they have steadied themselves on the two side legs, then pivoting onto the two back ones. They are trapeze artists. Acrobats. They spend the rest of the night booting the soccer ball around the backyard and walking to the gas station for candy and eventually, after Kevin’s mom has shut her door and they have given her almost an hour to fall asleep, trying to distinguish the breasts from the scramble waves in the blue-green go-anywhere of the Playboy Channel, all sound and no picture.

  It is after midnight before they turn out the lights. Kevin lies down in bed, Thad on the floor in his sleeping bag. From out of the darkness Thad asks, “So are you ready for school? My mom and dad let me use my birthday money to buy this gold chain I’m gonna wear around my neck. Herringbone.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Kevin announces. “Greg and his brother better stay the hell away from me, that’s all I have to say. I’ll tell the principal on them if I have to. I’ll do it. Watch me.”

  “Uh-huh. You know, Greg’s brother isn’t really going to stuff you in a locker. He’s gone—Greg and his brother both are. They moved away in July. We just told you that ’cause we wanted to see if you would freak out. You freaked out, didn’t you?”

  Kevin would like to kick the sheets off his bed, would like them to plummet to the carpet like a missile. “A little.”

  “I knew it. We were all—I don’t know, not annoyed with you really. We just wanted to screw with your head. It started when you sent us those sneaker stickers this summer. That’s when we came up with the locker story. I can’t explain it. They were so weird and random. It was like, Thanks but what the fuck? Sneakers? Why did you mail us those?”

  “I thought you guys would like them.”

  He remembers buying the stickers from the greeting card aisle of the Jitney Jungle when his dad took him grocery shopping. His only other choices were rainbows, ladybugs, or dogs with American flag bandannas. For the second time that day, Kevin feels a clutching in his throat, the salt sting of tears in his eyes. No. He is trying hard not to be him anymore, that kid.

  Sometimes, huddled in his sleeping bag, Thad can be unexpectedly nice, saying things like, “Well, it’s the thought that counts. You know, it’s all cool. But everyone is done collecting stickers—finished—so don’t go giving us any more. And nothing involving shoes, either. In fact, maybe you should just stop buying people presents all the time. None of that shit at all. So are you nervous? I can’t believe that two days from now we’ll be in junior high.”

  “One-point-five.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to wear my gold chain. Kenneth met some of the Sylvan Hills and Geyer Springers at football practice. He says they’re not too bad. I saw this blond chick when I went to register, and she was totally hot. I mean, Jesus Christ the shape of her ass. Like two scoops of ice cream in a glass bowl. You wouldn’t believe it. So are you nervous?”

  In kindergarten, when they were little, he and Thad used to play Star Wars on the jungle gym during recess, one of them the morning Han Solo, the other the afternoon. In third grade, they told elaborate lies during show-and-tell, Thad inventing Scooby-Doo stories about his dog Clarence, a coward and a mischief-maker, while Kevin reported the dreams he pretended to remember from the night before. Once, in fifth grade, the two of them showed their middle fingers to a whole squad of teenagers at the State Fair, escaping through the midway by the barest slip of space. And last year, nearly every Friday night, they met up with Kenneth and Bateman and a few of the others at Eight Wheels, where the younger kids skated the blue-lit oval of the wooden rink while the older kids stood around flirting in their high-tops. It was Kevin’s job, each week toward nine o’clock, to run out front and intercept whichever parent had agreed to fetch them while Kenneth and Thad finished making out with their girlfriends behind the building.

  “Honestly, I just don’t want anything to change.”

  “Me either,” says Thad.

  “I’m sick of things being different all the time.”

  “Me too.”

  And then it happens again, the same way it has happened a hundred times before, with the gaps between their answers growing longer and longer until their voices can barely leap over the stillness. Soon neither of them quite remembers what the other has said or whose turn it is to speak. Kevin is swooning into a dream of girls and dark rooms when his leg twitches and wakes him back up. A car goes roaring down the street toward the cowboy bar. Its headlights brighten the window. Then the glass seems to hitch
in its frame, and the brightness pops loose, curving and flashing across the ceiling before it vanishes behind the dresser. He has missed his chance, his one chance, to dive through it and find out where it would have taken him. He turns onto his left side, his sleeping side, and lies there listening to the whoosh of the air conditioner. The day keeps coming to light again in bits and pieces: the jellyfish-like burst of the pine tree letting go of the hillside, and the sound of bottles shattering on the asphalt, and Tes-ti-clees the ancient Greek god, and suicides of Coke and Sunkist and Dr Pepper, and the poor bird draining from its egg into the grass, and the tingle of his sweat cooling in a humming rectangle of air, and who liked him and how much and why? One by one his thoughts flow from their outlines like a cloud, and then the cloud rolls over him and he is asleep.

  Sunday passes as it always does, with church and Wyatt’s Cafeteria and the slow TV hours of the afternoon. Then it is Monday, and his mom is driving him across the river into the trees, and as they crest the hill and coast into the parking lot, the school grows gigantic in the windshield. They pull to a stop at the entrance. Something like a bird shoots out of his heart. Then he steps out onto the patio and becomes a part of it all. The blue sky and the glass doors and the white tile floor that blazes in the sunlight. The lockers crashing shut like cymbals. The high school guys punching each other’s shoulders, drafts of cologne and deodorant mixing between their bodies. The high school girls with their hair belled out around their necks. The black streaks of tennis shoe rubber on the floor of the gymnasium. The glass walls of the front office. The Reeboks and Levi’s, Izods and bomber jackets, jelly bracelets and Swatch watches. The football players in their jerseys. The band kids with their instrument cases. The chalkboards with their eraser-shaped smoke signals—poof, poof, poof. The pay phones in the foyer where the popular girls wait for the first bell to ring. The concession stand with its rolling metal gate. The stairwell with its stack of folding chairs. The couples kissing behind the doors of their lockers, pretending that no one can see them. The chopping and rolling noise of five hundred conversations happening all at once, like a river relaxing along its banks and then plunging ahead, over and over again. The butcher paper banners reading “WELCOME TO MUSTANG MOUNTAIN” and “STAYIN’ ALIVE IN 85” in gold and purple, the school colors, which are everywhere, everywhere. The vending machines with their coils of chips and candy. The desks with their attached chairs. The long hallways of open classroom doors, their doorstops like curving brass hoofs. The coaches and the teachers, the principal and the guidance counselor, the janitor in his plaid shirt and dark glasses. The other students, all of them older and bigger, standing in clusters against the walls and the lockers, their eyes sliding past the seventh-graders as they look for their buddies, their teammates, for their girlfriends and boyfriends, for someone who knows them, someone they recognize.

  The gym stands on one side of the hall, Mr. Garland’s class on the other, and every day, after first period, the girls finishing PE and the boys finishing Bible meet in the middle, twisting around each other like the tails of two kites. Sometimes, if Kevin paces himself just right, he will fall into step with Sarah Bell and her friends—the lip-gloss girls—with brush furrows in their wet hair and Guess triangles on their jeans. He basks in their incense of sweat and shampoo, thinking, This will be the day, the day I tell her a joke and graze her arm, a throwaway touch with the back sides of my fingers, nothing much, just quick and cool, as if I don’t care, but then a locker slams shut or a voice cuts through the air and once again the tiny comforting thought caresses his mind: Tomorrow. You can be brave tomorrow.

  The high school is all noise and unrest, as different as can be from the churchlike hush of the elementary school. Between periods the building fills with people shouting and running and flicking each other’s knuckles with pencils, with choir kids singing, photographers snapping pictures, drill-teamers cocking their hips, with couples bending hard into each other’s bodies. In class, they all become the quietest possible versions of themselves, but in the hallways everyone is either a swerver or a strider. The swervers move this way and that, leaning and swaying like tops, taking the quickest route possible through the obstacle course of other people’s bodies, while the striders choose a single path and follow it like a marble rolling down a chute. Kevin is a born swerver. He likes the sensation of bobbing beneath someone’s upraised arm, slipping sideways past a big clump of juniors and seniors, that wonderful feeling of swiftness and intangibility. No one can catch him, no one can touch him. He could be a ghost rushing through a brick wall, a motocross racer, almost anything.

  One day, just before the end of first period, the chemistry teacher, Mr. Shoaf, seeds the corridor outside his room with sulfur pellets, hundreds of little yellow beads that pop open with the earthy stink of rotten eggs. The odor washes through the northern wing of the school, and after the bell, as the boys in Kevin’s class step into the hallway, their faces take on the startled looks of sunbathers doused in cold water. They cough theatrically or give bewildered laughs. They tack their hips to the side as if they’ve cut a fart. Sarah, walking just ahead of them in her denim skirt and white ankle socks, says, “Barf,” and tugs the collar of her shirt up over her nose to mask the smell. That mouth, those breasts—Kevin wants to make a little bed between them.

  “Shit, man,” Levon Dollard says, taking an instinctive whiff. “This place fucking reeks.”

  And ting!—That’s what you get when the girls take PE, Kevin thinks.

  There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin’s mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously that frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be. He has discovered that whether a joke is truly witty doesn’t matter—only the glow in his voice, the glitter of invention. But Levon is one of the new kids, from Sylvan Hills or Geyer Springs, a tall ropy football player who isn’t familiar enough with Kevin to take it for granted that he is funny, so he bungles the delivery. “The girls. PE. You know, all that sweat.”

  No one laughs. It is funny embarrassing.

  Then Jess Watts says, “Or maybe it’s your upper lip, Kevin Brockmeier,” which everyone finds hilarious.

  Kevin is baffled. He understands the implication, that he is the one who stinks, he who smelt it dealt it—but his upper lip? Why? Surreptitiously, he runs his fingers over his mouth, but they come back clean, smelling of soap, pencil lead, and the leather strap of the camera satchel he uses for a book bag. Nothing disgusting.

  On the staircase landing, he calls out to M.B., who answers, “What did I say? I’m going by Michael now. Write it down. Michael.”

  “Whatever. Hey, do you see anything on my upper lip?”

  “Like your nose?”

  “Yes. Exactly. Like my nose. Very helpful, M.B.”

  “No problemo.”

  The intercom makes its electronic bell sound, a shrill tone with a strange dust of static at the beginning, and they hurry into their classes. In English, Miss Vincent fills the left side of the chalkboard with adjectives, then asks them to add their own words to the list: “Give me five adjectives—five attributes—you would use to describe yourself to a stranger.” Kevin is (1) scrawny, (2) oversensitive, (3) unathletic, (4) mouselike, and (5) girlfriendless. No, no, he is (1) friendly, (2) clever, (3) imaginative, and (4) likable. He is (5) awesome-beyond-all-adjectives. He is a good student, a fast writer. He charges through his assignments like a runner sprinting down a track, then sits at his desk daydreaming or reading novels, making up stories or mapping out dungeons.

  For the rest of the day, in Coach Dale’s geography class, Mrs. Dial’s math class, Mrs. Bissard’s SRA class—and why don’t they just call it reading?—he fills his spare time puzzling through Jess’s wisecrack. Either she just chose a part of his body at random, or there is something special about his upper lip, something he can’t figure out. The question, then, is what makes his upper l
ip unique? He has noticed that it has a tiny discoloration just off-center, soft and pale, like a cut immediately after it has finished healing, but how would Jess have seen that? He spotted it only a few nights ago himself, and solely by chance, studying his face in the bathroom mirror to see if he could make his tongue ripple. What else? His upper lip is pink and slender, much thinner than his lower lip. It is shaped like a bird in a landscape painting, that bowlike symbol preschoolers learn with their very first box of watercolors: an M with its legs pulled flat. In the winter sometimes, when he forgets to wear ChapStick, the skin above his lips becomes so red that it looks like the stain from a cherry popsicle—but that’s in January and February, not the second week of September. Brother. His ideas are getting less complicated by the minute. Let’s see: his upper lip is above his chin and beneath his nose. It is part of his mouth. He talks with his mouth, he sings with his mouth, he eats with his mouth, he drinks with his mouth. He uses his mouth to smile, to pout, to whistle, to yawn, to spit, to breathe, and to kiss. And that, he finally decides, is it. His upper lip or his lower lip, it makes no difference—he uses them, uses them both, to kiss.